Beginner's Guide to SSI
(server side includes)

Don't worry, SSI doesn't require a rocket-science degree to
understand and use. It is, however, a highly useful feature that lets you do
incredibly time saving tasks such as include the contents of an external
file across multiple pages on your site, or access and display server
specific information such as the current server time, visitor's IP address,
etc. In this tutorial I'll introduce new comers to the wonderful world of
SSI! SSI is short for Server Side Includes, by the way.

Does
my server support SSI?

The first thing that needs to be settled is whether your
server supports SSI and have it enabled. SSI is a Linux/Apache
specific feature, so if you're on a Windows server for example, you'll need
to look for the Windows equivalent of SSI (sorry, not a Window's guy). To
test if your server supports SSI then, you can run a simple test, by
inserting the below code inside a webpage, and saving the page with a .shtml
extension (the most common extension configured to parse SSI by default):

test.shtml source:

<!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" -->

When you run test.shtml in your browser, you should see the
current date plus time of your server displayed:

Monday, 19-Nov-2018 18:03:32 CST

If not, you can either ask your web host about SSI support for your
account, or try and manually enable SSI, by reading "Enabling SSI on my
server."